There are many applications in which a person seeks to retrieve structured and/or unstructured data or information from databases or documents. However, the person is often unknowledgeable or unfamiliar with retrieval characteristics such as the retrieval source names, context and/or source capabilities. As a result, the person may locate little or none of the available information of interest.
As one specific example, a military officer involved in planning an operation may be seeking certain intelligence information that will facilitate planning of the mission, such as recent aerial photographs, weather information, data regarding the relevant terrain, and so forth. Although the officer will be very familiar with the context and terminology of military operations, he or she may have little or no knowledge regarding the context and terminology used by the intelligence community in storing and classifying the information of interest.
One prior approach to this problem has been the generation of complex templates in structure query language. However, these templates require substantial user training, are difficult to use, and are not readily extensible. A different known approach involves the use of keyword and/or concept based search engines. However, such approaches do not accommodate user specific situation criteria that describe the context of the needed information. Thus, these search engines present problems similar to those involved with structure query language templates, including but not limited to the need for substantial user training.